The Firewall cleaved the Earth, a jagged scar of flame that gnawed the heavens. It was a ribbon of molten wrath born twenty-five thousand years ago in the Purge, when the world drowned in fire and shadow. It stretched equatorially, forming an eternal ring of nuclear fury. Its roar became a ceaseless hymn that split the globe into twin realms: the Northland, where steel towers crumbled under a dying sky; and the Southland, where the wild thrived amid ash and ruin. No star pierced its shroud and no wind crossed its maw. The Firewall marked the end of one age and became the forge of another, seen by some as a god’s wrath and by others as a ghost of catastrophe.

In the Northland, the air hangs thick with the tang of rust and ozone, a graveyard breath seeping from cities clinging to the bones of ancients. Spires of glass and iron stabbed upward, their peaks shrouded in a jaundiced haze, remnants of a civilization that once tamed the atom and rode the void. Now, their lights flickered, frail as guttering candles, casting long shadows over cracked plazas where the wind keened through hollow shells. The Firewall loomed to the south, a searing wall dominating the horizon. Its amber glow bled into a sky choked with ash and vapor. The land beneath withered; soil turned to dust and rivers to sludge, its life leached by the ceaseless hum of machines straining to hold back collapse. Men and women moved like spectres, clad in patchwork suits of circuits and steel, their faces gaunt beneath visors glowing with fading glyphs. They huddled in their citadels, techno-feudal lords atop a crumbling throne. The Firewall acted as their jailer, a barrier they named with cold precision, offering a shield against a South they had forgotten. Its heat drove their engines and scorched their dreams.

Beyond the blaze, the Southland sprawled. Here, the earth pulsed wild in a relentless riot of green and blood, unshackled by the Purge’s ruin. People called this the Skyforge, a divine forge blazing in the northern sky and bathing the steppe in ceaseless dusk, all red and gold. The air thrummed with life: humid, sharp, laced with the musk of beasts and the iron tang of slaughter. Vast plains stretched outward, their grasses swaying like a sea under winds howling from jagged peaks. Jungles clawed upward, with vines strangling ancient husks of metal swallowed by root and rot. Tribes roamed here, clad in hides stitched with bone and iron. Their blades were forged in fires stoked by the Skyforge’s breath. These warriors danced to drums echoing the wall’s roar. Their camps sprawled beneath the glow, hides stretched taut over frames of scavenged steel, fires spitting sparks that mingled with those raining from the sky. The Forgefather’s wrath had birthed them, they sang; iron men risen from molten earth, clay women fired by its heat. Their lives were brutal hymns of hunt and conquest, etched in scars and blood.

The Firewall towered, colossal and wondrous, a ribbon of flame many miles wide. Its edges were jagged with arcs of plasma that lashed the sky like whips of molten gold. Its heat warped the air into shimmering mirages; ghostly spires in the North, phantom beasts in the South. During a rare Firefall, embers tumbled from its heights to sear the earth below. These sparks, remnants of a forgotten colossus, whispered secrets lost to time. In the North, the embers scorched barren dust and vanished into machines that hummed a dirge. In the South, they sank into fertile soil, revered as god-gifts, and inspired tales of divine wrath and rebirth. The wall’s roar was a living pulse that could be felt in the marrow, a tremor that shook the land and stirred the blood. The Firewall carved climates: the Northland’s chill bled away under its heat while the Southland’s humid sprawl was fuelled by storms born of its fury. It shaped minds as well. Northlanders regarded it as a relic, a machine’s corpse to be dissected. Southlanders saw a forge and knelt before it, believing the embers were the Forgefather’s seed.

Twenty-five thousand years had dulled the Purge’s echo. Its fire faded to a scar in Northland archives and became myth in Southland songs. The North clung to steel, their cities gasping beneath a blood-red sky. The South thrived in the wild, their tribes at war beneath a flaming sky god they had never questioned. The Firewall stood sentinel, its blaze a vow of severance, until a spark flickered anew.

Deep in the Northland’s iron heart, a machine began to whirr. This Gateway issued a faint challenge to the wall’s roar. The Firewall trembled, as if waking to a breach that had long been sealed. Two worlds, sundered by fire, teetered on the edge of collision.